Now that the evidence has been released and we have all 1600+ ballots of the Sight and Sound poll, we can now see the patterns and what truly happened when it came to the controversial results.
Firstly, Amy Taubin was dead-on about her assertion that ‘Jeanne Dielman’ topping the poll had to do with “British Feminist Studies.” Ditto Celine Sciamma’s “Portrait of A Lady on Fire.”
For example, Sciamma’s film nabbed 60 votes — 42 of them from female critics and 37 from the UK.
I don’t mind that. It’s a British created poll so there will obviously be a skew towards more UK voters than any other country. The problem is that Sight and Sound also decided to be more inclusive with its voting pool this year. There was a much higher percentage of female critics than in previous years.
Again, nothing wrong with that.
They reached out to underrepresented groups of people, and the magazine made sure their asses were covered, but they truly missed out on the fundamentals.
The problem lies in that Sight and Sound really stretched it when it came to who they invited to participate in the poll. Given that this is an industry predominantly dominated by male and white critics, and that they went out of their way to include minority groups, some of the voters ended up being the opposite of connoisseurs of Film history.
Sight and Sound had the right idea in casting a wider net, and trying to make the voter pool more diverse, inclusive and international. But that was at the expense of a core group of critics who weren’t there. Plenty of well-renowned film critics were absent in the poll.
I have no time to look at all 1639 ballots and give you an in-depth rundown of what went wrong with this decade’s polling. However, what I did gather were worrying signs that S&S sacrificed quality for inclusive quality in terms of the poll participants that were chosen.
Jessica Balanzategui included “The Ring,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Babadook.”
Critic Danielle Solzman decided to go the mainstream route with a list that had many buzzing on Twitter, especially for the inclusion of “Avengers: Endgame.”
Alliance of Women in Film Journalist’s Jennifer Merin either didn’t see enough films from previous decades or she truly believes “Vice,” “Trial of the Chicago 7,” and “Promising Young Woman” are part of the ten greatest movies ever made.
George Bass, credited as a “licensed bouncer and freelance writer,” included “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” “The Karate Kid,” “Black Dynamite” and 2006 mockumentary “Kenny.”
Ondi Timoner decided to have an all-time top 10 consisting of “Women Talking,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Room,” and 2022’s “Elvis.”
How about Whelan Barzey‘s list? “Coach Carter,” “Training Day,” “Amistad,” and “Fruitvale Station.” The oldest film on his list is IMDB favorite “The Shawshank Redemption.”
Or, how about Oona Mosna? Here's one person who seems to really like all of her boyfriend's shorts, or maybe it’s her dad? Her brother? Regardless, she really really wants us to know that a certain Kevin Jerome Everson exists and that his work is just rad.
As mentioned last year, the infamous Girish Shambu, a Caltech professor hired in early summer as a “voting consultant” for the poll, blew the doors wide open by mixing the “chains of recommendation.” Even though he claims that he didn’t want changes to occur, a tweet written by him dated 08.08.22 might say otherwise.
Here's what Shambu submitted in 2012. Here are his submitted picks for 2022. Notice the contrast? Clearly, his film tastes explicitly changed over the course of ten years. Gone are the nine male-directed films he once championed, all for the sake of inclusivity and defying the male canon.
He also left a nifty little note that accompanied his new picks:
In the last decade, the single most powerful influence upon my own cinephilia has been the ever-intensifying realisation of a central injustice in film culture: the marginalisation of women in every single realm, from financing and production all the way to film criticism.
Of course his is just one ballot, but lest I remind you that this is the guy that Sight and Sound hired to oversee a part of the polling. As his above tweet suggested, he wanted to set the canon on fire.
Taken from a transcript of an October panel in which Shambu participated and admitted to being hired as a “diversity advisor” on the poll:
Yes, so I was asked to be an advisor and my only task was to suggest people to add to the voter pool, to expand the voter pool. That was my only task, so I sent them dozens of suggestions of people, mostly women, mostly people of color, mostly queer people, disabled critics, trans critics and scholars and people's work that I kind of knew and knew it would result in a diverse set of lists. I was not partied to any discussions about this. I sent them lists.
This aligns well with the big trend in this year’s poll: the downward of the stapled “arthouse classic” and the rise of the “identity film”. These sort of politics invaded the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, both in its selection of those who voted and the films themselves.
It’s not even about ‘Jeanne Dielman,’ a rewarding slowburn, winning, but rather the total disintegration of the poll itself. It used to be that the Sight and Sound poll meant something due to the prestige of those who voted, scholarly types, historians and journalists knowledgeable about cinema’s rich 100+ year history. Those days are gone.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.